Identification

I’ve been somewhat focused on AIS this month.  I’m the proud new owner of the venerable XB-8000 transponder.  That’ll get the ladies’ loins a stirrin’  But let’s not forget the Vesper antenna splitter.  That’ll take ‘em right over the edge.

AIS transmits a boat’s position, speed, name etc to anyone else who has AIS.  Most boats do by now, so we can all see each other on our plotters.

The antenna spitter taps into the vhf radio antenna.  Easy.  Power and data were a little more challenging.  Installing an AIS transponder is a great opportunity to get to know your boat.  You have to figure out how best to apply power and push the data cables through the bundles of existing cables.  You have to figure out what you’ve got, to know what get’s connected where.  Profound stuff.

I got it working using a temporary gps antenna.  The unit transmits and receives.  I can pull up an app on my ipod and see a display of the targets received nearby.  The next step is to tap into the boat’s data bus by reading its gps and displaying the targets on the plotter.  It’s all standard format data so it should work...